Just a couple of garden nerds in Baltimore (USDA Zone 7)

Garden Progress — Growing Our Own Salsa

It’s officially summer and our garden is in full swing! We’re a bit behind where we were last year since we didn’t start any of our seeds indoors and some of our friendly neighborhood pests (I’m looking at you, rabbits!) have caused some of our plants to fall even further behind.

There’s a lot going on in our garden now so for this post I’m going to limit my updates to the plants in our salsa garden.

White Onions

It doesn’t look like much when the part of the plant you’re waiting for is under the ground but from the tops that are just sticking out of the dirt, it looks like the onions are doing well. They were planted in late April and it takes about three to four months for them to be ready for harvesting so they should be ready in late July or August.

Garlic

Like the onions, the garlic hasn’t changed much. We’re waiting for the tops to yellow and fall over, which will be the signal that these guys are ready to be dug up!

Tomatoes

In the middle of May, we had a bunch of little roma tomato seedlings popping up but before they were able to get well established, something came digging through the bed and disturbed all of them. Luckily, we had planted some extra tomato seeds in a tomato pot so one tomato plant remained and is still alive and flowering today!

To replace the lost tomato plants, we got some donations from family and friends including a big boy tomato plant (thanks, John!), which is already starting to fruit, and a couple either cherry or grape tomato plants (thanks, Dianne!).

Jalapeño Peppers

It took so long for our pepper plants to pop up that we were beginning to wonder if the birds and squirrels ate the seeds. The seeds were planted on April 29 and this photo was taken on June 15 of one of two pepper plants that came up.

Unfortunately, both have since been chopped down by hungry rabbits. I’ll tell you more about our rabbit battle in a following post.